The Last Corn Elwin Dried

The grader at the elevator probed it again, the way they do every load, and wrote down the same numbers Merritt had written at the farm. Fourteen point eight. Number two. Sound.

Arlette held that second ticket for a long time. Then she put it in the barn coat pocket with the first one and buttoned it again.

I hauled the other eight loads over the next four days. Halvor ran the auger.

On the last day, when the bin was down to the cone and the corn would not slide to the gate on its own anymore, he shut the slide and the auger off, went in through the door with a push broom, and swept the last of it down, the way Elwin taught him, never stepping in while anything was turning.

Then he opened the slide again, and the very last bushels ran out the gate and up the auger into my trailer.

Halvor shut it all down and stood in the door of that empty bin for a while, looking at the bare cone and the fan duct. Then he swept out the corners by hand.

The check came the following Friday. Nine thousand bushels and a little over, at four dollars and twelve cents.

Arlette opened it at her kitchen table with Halvor and me sitting there, and she looked at it, and then she handed it to Halvor and asked him to take it to the bank in the morning.

Duane called her that Sunday. And the Sunday after that. And a couple of times in between, on a Tuesday and on a Thursday, always in the afternoon.

I was at her house for one of them. The phone rang on the wall by the refrigerator, and she looked at it, and she let it ring.

“You can answer it, Mom,” Halvor told her. “If you want to. Nobody here would think less of you.”

“I know I can,” Arlette said. “I’m praying for him every night, Halvor. I’ll keep doing it. But I don’t have to listen to him tell me one more thing about Elwin’s corn.”

Later that spring, I heard at the coffee shop that Duane had sold his good pickup and a disk to make his note, and that he was renting out his ground to a neighbor for a year.

I did not feel glad about it. I did not feel much of anything, except tired, and sorry for the boy who used to spend his summers on the home place.

Merritt Bauer came to church at Easter, which he does not usually do at ours. He sat two rows behind Arlette, and afterward in the basement he shook her hand and asked how she was getting along.

She told him fine. He told her the corn had gone out on a train to the Gulf and every kernel of it graded.

Halvor kept the notebook. It sits on the shelf in our kitchen, over the radio, next to the Bible.

Every fall when we dry our own corn, he takes it down and starts a new page, in his own slanted handwriting, right under his dad’s last column.

And Arlette still rides with me. The first load of every harvest and the last one, and any time she just feels like getting out.

Right hand on the dash, fingers spread, humming under the engine all fourteen miles to the elevator.

The check was a little over thirty-seven thousand dollars, and Arlette never answered Duane’s call again.